Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers?

There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly

https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...

DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.

That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages https://pages.github.com/. You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.

bennofs · 6 years ago

Actually, you can have multiple github pages sites: just create a new repo with a branch named gh-pages. You can then add a CNAME to that as well.

vinni2 · 6 years ago

Many cloud providers like digital ocean have student offers [1] with GitHub student developer program worth trying out.

[1] https://blog.digitalocean.com/were-participating-in-githubs-...

52-6F-62 · 6 years ago

Yep. I use DO and it’s been just fine for low traffic websites. They’ve been great to work with and very easy to use. But I only host personal projects and internal tooling projects with them. Can’t speak to scaling but my experience has been positive.

pnutjam · 6 years ago

For cheap hosting, nearlyfreespeech.net is where it's at, cheap and full shell access on bad.

It's all about the pre-cloud hosting providers.

Check out the Black Hat SEO forums - the people there generally are running all manner of sketchy services, bots, crawlers, etc. that need the cheapest compute available.

The old hosting providers often have deals that can get you more power than the equivalent Amazon machine for the same price. If you're looking to be able to host something that other people might use, this is a solid way to go; just make sure you build something that it's easy for you to re-deploy elsewhere (i.e. at the very least have all your code in a separate revision control system, and some mechanism to back up any databases / locally created files to your home machine).

If you're really just looking for something dirt cheap for personal projects that won't see use beyond yourself, the free / up to $5/mo tier of the big cloud providers is a reasonable thing to check out. https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs-di... is a bit old now, maybe there's a newer article helping you sort that out.

chatmasta · 6 years ago

Also look at webhostingtalk.com (that’s where all the BHW vendors are buying from anyway)

shpx · 6 years ago

core-questions · 6 years ago

balkierode · 6 years ago

Google cloud free tier gives everyone (not just students) one 'always' free vps instance. It works great for me.

Oracle promised 2 instances but got an error 'out of capacity' error instead. Support staff confirmed they dont have hardware in my region.

ac29 · 6 years ago

Just remember Google only gives you 1GB of egress network traffic free, per month. This might be enough for a small personal project, but even a low traffic website will easily surpass that - doing a Show HN or something will blow through that quickly.

rcarmo · 6 years ago

Put CloudFlare in front. Works fine for me.

guitarsteve · 6 years ago

I was using that feature for the last year or so but recently they took away the public IP address. So I think it’s no longer free for common use cases like hosting a website. Correct me if I’m wrong!

rumanator · 6 years ago

Hetzner.

They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.

ar-jan · 6 years ago

I second Hetzner. Their smallest VPS has been reliable for me and is even a bit cheaper than OVH. More importantly, should something go wrong or you have a question, you can expect a quite fast reply.

mstolpm · 6 years ago

Recommending Hetzner Cloud as well. They had some connectivity problems 6-12 months ago, but seem very stable in the last months. They provide backup and snapshot features, floating IPs, internal networking and mountable volumes as well - which can be handy in comparison to a barebones server from e.g. Kimsufi where you have to manage everything yourself. Hetzners lowest tier is "much" cheaper than DO and co.

kyriakos · 6 years ago

Decent uptime too. I have a vm running there with over 3 years of uptime. Not bad considering the price.

wildduck · 6 years ago

And they have DDoS protection layer! With European data protection law better than US. It is a no brainer to pick Hetzner instead of any other services. They do have a difficult to remember name, maybe rebrand it for English speaking market.

blfr · 6 years ago

OVH, Hetzner, and the whole Low End family

https://lowendstock.com/

https://www.lowendtalk.com/

https://lowendbox.com/

But nowadays you can get servers for free. AWS, Google, and even Oracle have free triers:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

https://cloud.google.com/free/

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

IIRC, at least the Amazon EC2 free tier is limited to the first 12 months. There was a point at which I got billed for the instance that was free before.

tomcooks · 6 years ago

Lowendbox, lurk 3+ years offers during blackfriday and you'll pay 1-5 dollars/year for a 2gb ram VPS with unlimited traffic in a non 13-eyes country. Payable in bitcoin.

nickjj · 6 years ago

I use digitalocean.

Not because they are cheap but because they are great. It just so happens they have a $5 / month plan for a 1 CPU core / 1GB of memory / 25GB SSD server.

jppope · 6 years ago

agreed. I also use AWS for certain projects... IMO- Don't put all your eggs in one basket

_bxg1 · 6 years ago

Heroku is free if you don't need constant uptime (it shuts down your server when it's idle for a while and starts it back up when a request comes in). Then the cheapest paid tier is $7.

It's also really pleasant because you deploy by just pushing your code; no SSHing or cron jobs. You do code an entire server process; you just don't manage it. So it's like halfway-serverless.

The downside, other than being $7 instead of $5, is that that's only for a single process; you can't run multiple low-compute servers within that $7. The file system also gets wiped whenever you deploy, so it's not appropriate for a database.